I have a server with something called "PERC H710 Adapter RAID Controller", which (I believe) is a hardware RAID interface. I went into the BIOS screen and set it up as RAID-5, and I didn't use LVM.

Is there a way to find out whether one of the disks has gone bad? When something goes wrong, the lights on the disks change from green to orange, but the server is currently stored in the server room, so I can't keep my eyes on it. I contacted the server vendor but there was no help, because Gentoo isn't an OS they support. I'd appreciate any suggestions.
__
sol

Last edited by solamour on Fri Oct 05, 2012 5:00 am; edited 1 time in total

I've always been able to find a utilities package for every hardware RAID controller I've used. The utility outputs status and, when run from a script launched by a cron job, can make a decision to email me if there's an issue. Works like a charm.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

The PERC H200 controller will let you query the SMART status directly with smartctl. IIRC, you should have /dev/sg\d+ devices for each drive which you can query, each one maps to one of the underlying drives. I would assume the H710 is similar._________________Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!

Yeah, like I said, SMART != RAID management. A little Googling determined that the package for Perc RAID controllers is Dell OpenManage. There's a Debian package here, so you'll have some work setting it up under Gentoo. I wasn't able to find any existing ebuild.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

As mentioned by JRG, Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator looks promising, but the Dell support wasn't exactly helpful, because I'm not using the Linux distro they are supporting. I'll do some more digging and report the progress.
__
sol

I wouldn't've expected any help from Dell. I didn't get any help from Adaptec either but there is an ebuild for their older controllers in Portage (sys-apps/raidutils) which I've helped maintain. krinn's right about the newer ones: I made an (as yet unsubmitted) ebuild for arcconf which supports their newer cards. Both work very well under Gentoo.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.